


Bones

by SyllableFromSound



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Marriage Proposal, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Post-Finale, Sharing a Bed, Wakes & Funerals, i know all those tags make it sound angsty but there's a happy ending and cute moments i promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:40:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23352580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SyllableFromSound/pseuds/SyllableFromSound
Summary: "If Carey listened long enough, she could make herself believe that everything was the same, that she wasn’t living inside the skeleton of the place she’d once called home. That no one and nothing had been lost. Even with her Darkvision, the cracks in the plaster of this room didn’t stick out so much. She fell asleep slumped against Killian’s shoulder, sunk into her voice."The battle against the hunger is over. Everything and everyone is different, almost. (Written for @nothinelsemattered on tumblr.)
Relationships: Carey Fangbattle/Killian
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25





	Bones

In the middle of the night that followed the battle against the Hunger, Carey lay awake and thanked her lucky stars that she was not like other Dragonborn.

She'd accepted it a long time ago, of course. She'd had to. Her wisp of a body that refused to bulk up no matter how much strength she gained, her arms so thin and gangly that the larger members of her clan could encircle her bicep between their thumb and forefinger--eventually, she would wield these things in a way that would let her disappear completely as needed. Before she learned to be a rogue, though, her smallness and strangeness simply meant that she was there, but less so.

Nowadays, she liked her body for how it could run and strike and dodge and hide. She liked it for how it let her move. Only rarely were there times, like now, when she loved it in stillness, for just being. She loved how her form fit against Killian's, effortless as breathing during sleep. (And Killian, thank the gods, was breathing, was reassuring with every breath, was still alive.) Right now, she loved the tail that had inconvenienced her so much when she was younger. Hers wasn't thick and strong like others she knew, but whiplike and too long and so little under her control that she knocked candles off the dinner table more than once. Now, it was wrapped twice around Killian's ankle, not tightly, but securely enough for her to know that they would not be pulled apart.

They'd been attached like that for hours now, even before they'd settled into a half-broken easy chair together for the night. Carey had clung to her, too, as she tried to patch up Killian's arm while it bled and bled and bled and made the bandages slick in her fingers. Not even bandages, really, but strips of cloth she'd ripped. She couldn't think of anyone more woefully unaware of how to heal than herself. She tried not to think about the dulling of Killian's golden eyes, their loss of focus. The strongest woman she knew, letting her head droop under its own weight. She thought about it anyway, and it kept her up longer.

What kept her up longer still was the thought of what Killian had said at the time.

She fell asleep just before dawn and woke up once while the sun was still golden, then again in the afternoon, when it came in through the blinds and left neat lines of white light on the opposite wall. The third time she got up, late in the day, was the first time in almost twenty-four hours that she met Killian's eyes, wide awake.

"We did it, huh?" she whispered. Somewhere outside, far away, the clamor of voices in celebration sounded like ocean waves.

It was easy to forget, sometimes, that Killian's kind were mostly nocturnal. She'd never complained about adjusting to the daytime routine shared by most others on the Moonbase, and she'd always pulled off wearing around "cool guy shades" so well that one could forget that she did it to keep the sun out of her sensitive eyes. But Carey was reminded of it many, many times in the days following the battle.

Killian, who in the past would wake up with the sun in order to train under the now-shattered glass roof of the base’s gym, was more alive at night than she had ever been. Carey remembered it when the two of them sat together in front of the window and waited until moonlight was the only thing left with them in the room. The stars were friends to Killian as much as they were friends to any traveler. She knew all of their names and the stories woven into them. If Carey listened long enough, she could make herself believe that everything was the same, that she wasn’t living inside the skeleton of the place she’d once called home. That no one and nothing had been lost. Even with her Darkvision, the cracks in the plaster of this room didn’t stick out so much. She fell asleep slumped against Killian’s shoulder, sunk into her voice. 

She also remembered how the night suited Killian when the sun was out (the sky now clean of black ooze and surely, surely, she hoped, bound to stay that way). With their former daily duties now null and void among the ruins of the Bureau, they both stayed suspended in quiet as if in water. As Killian slept through the bright afternoons, her dark hair came loose from its waist-length braid and sprawled over the pillows, over Carey when she curled up close enough. She stayed awake and watched and imagined that hair falling over the throw pillows of a home. Then she stopped before she imagined the rest. She remembered later that night, when she bolted straight out of a nightmare and into a sitting position in bed, and she would have started to shake if not for the large hand placed gently on her chest to ease her back onto the sheets. Killian had been awake and stayed awake while she drifted back off. 

Eons ago, when they were new to each other, Carey’s heart hadn’t known the difference between fear and want, and it pounded fast either way. By now, it had learned to slow when she lay on the other woman’s chest.

She needed to do something. Killian rolled her eyes when she insisted on being the one to change her bandages and track the progress of her broken arm. But it was the same kind of eye-roll she gave when Carey used to goad her into racing back to the house, which meant really she appreciated it. Besides, Merle was busy enough healing everyone else and could use one less patient. He showed her what to do, and after only several instances of her forgetting the disinfectant or accidentally ripping the gauze on her claw tips, she got it. She wound the clean white material around the wounds on Killian’s thigh and sometimes thought about wrapping up the rest of her, wrapping her up in softness and taking her away. Then Killian would notice her slowing down and ask her if anyone was home in there, and Carey would reach up to flick her on the forehead.

While watching this, Merle kept smiling and nodding at her now and then, like he was answering questions she hadn’t asked him. She’d liked him better when he was more of an idiot. Though, she had to admit, she had never before seen him so at home healing, so unshakably content and present for those he helped, when before he seemed to do it because it was what he had always done. His kids tailed behind him much of the time as he went from patient to patient.

Killian did a lot of reading. Sometimes she did it out loud, which Carey liked best, because she only understood poetry when it came out of her mouth. Carey remembered her saying that, as a young adult, she hadn’t had much besides the books she borrowed from libraries and then never returned as she went from town to town in search of work. Thought of saving up and studying to be a lore bard, though things went differently for her, obviously.

Carey didn’t know who she could have become if not the person she was now. From the start, she’d been an excellent rogue. Fucking amazing, if she did say so herself. She’d come by it in the usual way, born with a natural deftness and a skill for turning her childhood falls into graceful tumbles. By the time she was fourteen, she could disarm someone with a well-placed strike, in the event that her smile and non-threatening size weren’t enough to let a target’s guard down. She might have gone on that way, using her powers to draw out gossip and steal things she could have simply bought with family money, but instead wealthy friends of friends of her parents got wind of what she could do. That was that. She hadn’t had to do much of anything, really, aside from the things that had always come as easily to her as breathing—sneaking and stealing and gleaning information from clients’ competitors. Kids’ stuff.

Even her position at the Bureau hadn’t been her doing. This, too, she’d tripped into. Then, as usual, she’d broken her fall and taken it in stride before anyone could notice she hadn’t meant it. If Carey hadn’t been assigned to track a snow-haired woman who was new in town and asking questions she shouldn’t have been, she wouldn’t have gotten to where she was. It was only because the Director—Lucretia, she insisted that people call her Lucretia now—because Lucretia had seen her snooping, sandwiched her between the wall and an invisible force field of magic, looked her over, and asked how she would like a better job.

Unlike her, Killian was deliberate, always. Carey had come to believe that she could do anything she chose. Now, with everything changed, she could make any choice she wanted, leave for anywhere. 

In the heat of the moment, on what people were now pretentiously dubbing the Day of Story and Song, Killian had said that she knew exactly what she wanted after the dust had settled. But that had been before the Bureau of Balance dissolved and everything fell into flux. That had been before she had had other options.

Magnus was the one who was able to pull her away, of course. He did it with all his usual boldness, walking up and tossing her a shovel and saying, “Bet I can clear more of the East Wing than you.” So she left while Killian slept, and she punched his shoulder and made jabs about his greying hair and helped rebuild, and at one point he tried to apologize for faking his death because he hadn’t properly before, and she promptly shut him up. He asked about that ring, too. She shut him up again.

She prided herself on how quickly she’d been able to adjust to the new way in the weeks after the Hunger ravaged the Moonbase. She liked, in the morning, when she could watch people’s tired faces turn up tired smiles as she called down to them from the bare rafters, cheerfully chide them, do her morning sunbathing under one of the many as-yet-unrepaired holes in the domed roof. It seemed to put people at ease. Everyone needed to be put at ease, these days. Maybe even she did. In these moments, it felt almost as it had before everything. She didn’t think about Avi’s desire to work on his own scientific projects, his saying that he wanted to travel for awhile and leave behind certain memories that the Moonbase held. Instead, she threw wet plaster at his cheek and ran off laughing, but not before she turned back and saw the smile that came to his face.

It was weeks later when Killian came up to her after a long day of this work, walking tall, as she always did, and with a purpose, as she often did, and for an instant Carey was sure of what she was going to say, and again her heart didn’t know the difference between fear and want. Instead, she said, “I need your help. I have an idea.”

The moon didn’t have an abundance of black rock. But that just meant that they had to go out looking together for longer, talking under the night sky or else letting the crunch of grit under their feet do the talking for them. The rocks had to be black, apparently. As they searched, Killian talked about Orcish burial. The rocks black as the earth would be painted white--color of death, light, and that which was lasting. Then, markings would be etched into them and reveal the black underneath again. Each cut would imitate a scar on the body of the dead, since orcs loved their scars so well, whether they were put there as marks of ritual or battle or life. Carey said she never thought Killian would be one to wax poetic about tradition, then wondered if it was insensitive to say so. But Killian chuckled. “Just this once,” she said.

Killian didn’t have any of the ritual scars, though she had plenty of others. Apparently, you only got those as an adult in a tribe, and she hadn’t lived among other orcs long enough for that. But she still knew the traditions. She knew how to construct the stone pillars that marked gravesites, those meant to be seen stark and white against dark, open fields by nomads traveling at night.

They got the same dirt on their hands. Carey loved her short nails and the way she carried smooth rocks as though they were fragile eggs, cupped and snug in her palms. They painted together.

They built the cairns near trees that survived the Hunger’s onslaught, near the edge of the Moonbase’s campus. Carey helped lift stones into place. This was something she could do. It was easy to do something, anything. Being was harder. She hadn’t attended many funerals in her life, none since cutting ties with her clan for good and none for anyone she’d been close to. In recent years, those in her life who had died got no funeral at all. When someone in the Bureau went, she had just waited until the erasure, until the forgetting could take away the heaviness in her gut.

But she remembered now. In the quietest hours of the past weeks, she’d done nothing but remember.

She saw them again, when she and Killian stepped back from the cairns that were built. On one stone, there appeared the distinct X-shaped scar that had been above Brian’s eye, a reminder of an overly enthusiastic play-bite from Spider Bryan. On another pile, a long line, stretching across several stones, to resemble the scar that ran all the way up Johann’s leg. All of the simple stacks of rock looking strangely like figures in the dark, standing up straight. Like her friends, standing up straight again.

Carey stood there, too, and tried to figure out what to feel. There was a hollowness in her gut that was not passive, like a hole in the ground, but active, like a drain sucking everything down. These were the friends whom she always knew, as an Enforcer, she might one day have to kill. These were the friends she’d let herself forget about. It seemed almost selfish that only now was she bothering to mourn them.

She would have kept thinking this way had the sound of a shaky breath not pulled her out of herself. Killian’s eyes shone, even more so than they normally did at night. That was all it took for Carey to go to her, wrap her arms around her waist and her tail around her leg. She reached up to whisper in Killian’s ear, “I’m sorry,” because she figured that that was what you said at a vigil, but mostly because she wanted Killian to hear her voice nearby. This she could do. 

“I’m sorry, too.”

Killian enfolded her easily, as always. Carey took in the scent of her shirt and couldn’t think of anywhere in the vastness of the planar system where she might feel more secure. If she didn’t have this, she wagered, she would never feel that way again. Before she even knew she was doing it, she spoke aloud the thought that stood out most in her mind. “Did you mean it?”

“What?”

“I said, did, uh…” When she took a deep breath, it felt almost hot enough inside her to hurt, the way it did before she let out a blast of fire and lightning. This time, she just exhaled and tried to let the feeling fade. “Did you mean it? During the fight, I mean.”

It was clear that Killian still didn’t understand. And then, all at once, she did. She almost jerked in surprise. Both of them, she knew, were remembering now how Killian, through her ragged breathing, had turned to Carey as she knelt to tend her wounds in the midst of the battle and said,  _ If we get out of this, I’m marrying you. _

“I think that depends,” Killian said, finally. There was a smile in her voice. “I can’t really marry you unless you agree to it first.”

For once, Carey Fangbattle did not have a snappy reply.

“What is it?”

“No, sorry, I just…” She scrubbed at her eyes, and the back of her hand came away wet. “It’s just a lot to process, you know?”

Killian couldn’t have seen her face. Her chin stayed settled into the crook of Carey’s neck. But it was like she didn’t even need sound to comprehend, only Carey’s breath. “That’s not all it is,” she whispered. It was not a question. 

“No, it’s…” But for once, even coming up with a lame excuse felt like too much heavy lifting. This was why she hated to feel this way, this dragging, graceless way. It only slowed her down, made her less able to do what she needed to do. 

A tighter squeeze. “It’s what?”

Sour spit filled her mouth and made the words stick together. Into Killian’s shoulder, half-hoping she wouldn’t be heard, she mumbled, “You were supposed to be the one who stayed safe.”

At last, after a pause, Killian pulled back. Carey resisted the urge to turn away from her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“You got hurt really fucking bad, Killer,” she answered hoarsely. “And it...I don’t know. It’s stupid, but I guess it fucked me up, ‘cause in my head, you were always the one person who’d be fine and who’d always stay, and I thought maybe you’d be gone, and I didn’t know enough to do anything to help.” She looked over Killian’s shoulder at the stones.

“I mean, are you dumb? Because the way I recall, I wouldn’t have gotten out of that mess if you hadn’t been there to torch the Hunger like a badass.”

“Shut up.  _ You’re _ dumb.” She sniffed but slowly grinned. “Everything’s changing. That kind of thing doesn’t normally bother me, but it does now.”

Killian pulled her back in. “I know everything’s going to be different,” she said. “But I want one thing to stay the same, and it’s this. If that’s what you want.”

Carey breathed her in again, and kept on breathing like that for several minutes, until her lungs and mind slowed again. They so seldom did outside of these moments. “Taako’s going to want to take over the catering for the wedding, you know,” she mumbled at last.

“I get the feeling we’ll need all the help we can get planning anyway,” Killian laughed quietly, wonderfully. “Everyone can join in.”

**Author's Note:**

> Ayyy what's up it's been awhile! As I said in the summary, this was written for @nothinelsemattered on tumblr, as a prize for a raffle I held on my blog, @adventuresloane. Tysm for being a follower and a very cool person!
> 
> Also I wrote part of this when I was bored at work and it's my first time writing Sweet Flips lmao uhhh hope it turned out alright???
> 
> Anyway, I hope this tender, vaguely post-apocalyptic story provided you with a short distraction from current events. Things are frightening and uncertain now but there's gonna be an end to it. I thank you very much for reading, and if you'd like to take the time to comment, I'd deeply appreciate it.


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